Two Barrel Limit

Two Trash Barrel Limit

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is coming to life. Only now Newspeak is called Politically Correct. As Doug Casey pointed out in a recent interview “So if you corrupt words you can alter and corrupt people’s thoughts. … And it’s worse, if you have the wrong word.”

The environmental folklore behind feel good, green ordinances is misguided and softer than a boiled grape:-

There’s no such thing as renewable energy. There is a “quality” characteristic (technically entropy) that deteriorates when energy is used either productively or wastefully. It’s use it or lose it, but you can’t get it back.

CO2 is plant food. Together with water it’s the main ingredient is photosynthesis.

CO2 doesn’t act like an insulating blanket. The energy/temperature balance with the sun is ruled by same science as solar cells.

"An Inconvenient Truth" is riddled with errors and the dire predictions are not happening.

The “Precautionary Principal” is crying wolf.

Nothing really gets thrown away; it’s all still here (maybe in a different form) but still here.

“Sustainability” and “Recycling” are passé. Real recycling went out with the milkman or when the bottles stopped going back to the brewery and the soda bottling plant to get washed, sanitized and refilled. (Crushing the bottles for ease of transportation and mixing the colors means it can’t re-manufacture as glass.)

The current product development methodology is designing for a closed loop system.

Life cycle analysis shows that landfill mining is profitable. 90% of the metals are being recovered and reused. The least expensive place to mine for gold is in an electronics dump! The plastics in the landfills are more valuable than the steel. It’s cheaper to recover and reuse the plastics from the shredder waste than to start with oil!

The “biodegradable” label is deceptive. In nature when exposed to air and microbes carbohydrates get digested and returned as CO2. But in a landfill it’s a very warm, anaerobic process (without O2) that produces CH4 (methane) a more potent greenhouse gas. Think Stanley Street or the closed dump off Brimbal Ave.

So what do we get for all this strain and pain of a two barrel limit?

A pro-forma recasting the May 2017 surveys of Beverly’s trash pick up to simulate the impact of a 2 barrel limit indicates a 16% reduction in the number of barrels picked up. With $1.5M fixed cost for curbside collection and $1M for incineration indicates less than $150K overall saving or 6%. (Eliminating a barrel or two here and there won’t impact the pickup cost only the incineration cost. (Trying to control tonnage by limiting volume leads to cramming more in each barrel.)

These feel good ordinances are reminiscent of an elementary school experience we can all relate to. The class is getting noisy and the teacher working at the board turns around and demands WHO’S TALKING! Getting no confession; the teacher demands that everybody must write 100 times “I will not talk in class”!

While teaching 8th grade Algebra I, I had the same experience. So I turned around and asked in the most naïve, sincere way “Does somebody have a question?” You could have heard a pin drop.

There’s always a better way than punishing people who are doing the right thing just because you can’t get the reprobates to buy into your vision of how it should be.

In 23.4, Mathew got the quote correct about the elites “They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.”

Since the 5 barrel limit was realized after City Council action, when is a 2 barrel limit ordinance coming up for a public hearing and a vote?

A few weeks back Beverly Patch reported on the Niche List of the top 100 cities in Massachusetts. Beverly didn’t make the cut! Beverly wasn’t downgraded because it wasn’t a Sanctuary City; nor because it didn’t ban plastic bags; nor because it didn’t limit the number of trash barrels to two. It was downgraded because of Housing, Crime & Safety, Diversity and Public Schools. That’s where the City’s Administration and Council focus should be!